The Marine Trick for Taking an Eight-Minute Nap
Short naps, no more than ten minutes, can be very effective, since they help improve our mood and performance throughout the afternoon. How to do it right…
After eating it is the habit of many to lie down to take a nap. This has already been clinically studied and is known to have multiple benefits for health and contributes to improving our mood, our performance and, in general, to being more relaxed. It has also been shown that short naps, lasting between six and ten minutes, are very effective.
For some, such a short break can be difficult - if not impossible - as they claim to need more time to fall asleep. However, social networks are full of advice and recommendations for everything, even to be able to take a short nap when you only have about 10 minutes for it.
This is the case of the following video shared by a TikTok user, Nick Vitello, which is the trick followed by the members of the elite military unit, the US Navy (Navy Seals), to be able to take a break, despite the fact of having little time for it.
This consists of lying on the floor and placing your feet on a raised surface, such as a bed, in such a way that your knees form a 90º angle. Next, “set a timer for eight minutes and take the best nap of your life”, says the young man in the video.
See also: Could a high-protein diet help you get a deeper sleep?
Benefits of short naps
Naps of this type, of no more than ten minutes, help us to be more concentrated and make fewer mistakes in the activities that we are going to do in the afternoon, in addition to what we have already mentioned before: to have a better mood and greater relaxation.
However, long naps —up to an hour and a half— have benefits similar to those of sleeping at night. This is because the body enters REM sleep, which is when the brain regions used for learning are stimulated.